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What This Example Shows

  • A HierarchicalSwarm modeling a small consulting team: Engagement Director plus four senior workers
  • Four specialist workers — Industry Analyst, Customer Researcher, Competitor Analyst, Financial Modeler — each owning one function of the engagement
  • A director prompt that forces the final output into a slide-by-slide deck outline with chart callouts and a Pyramid-Principle recommendation
  • How to run the same engagement across a portfolio of clients in one call via /v1/swarm/batch/completions
Premium tier features used. HierarchicalSwarm is available on every plan, but production workloads benefit from the Pro, Ultra, and Premium tiers (/v1/swarm/batch/completions, longer runs, higher concurrency). Upgrade or manage your plan at https://swarms.world/platform/account.

Why This Matters

A first-cut market entry analysis at a top consultancy is six weeks of two associates, an EM, and partial partner time — call it $200k–$500k of fees before the client sees a single slide. The actual analytic work in that first cut is bounded: size the market, map the competitors, profile the customer, sketch the unit economics, write a recommendation. This swarm does the full first cut in minutes so the partner can spend Friday afternoon arguing about the recommendation, not formatting slides.

Step 1: Setup

Step 2: Define the Engagement Team

Four workers each own one chapter of the deck. The Engagement Director is told, very explicitly, to produce a slide-by-slide outline — not a memo — but see the mechanism note below for what it actually takes to get that agent to see the other four outputs.
HierarchicalSwarm always builds its own director from director_model_name (default gpt-5.4) that decomposes the task and dispatches it to every agent in agents — the Engagement Director above runs as one of the director’s workers, not as a privileged synthesizer, and with the default max_loops: 1 and parallel worker execution, no agent (Engagement Director included) sees another specialist’s output before writing its own deck outline. For a guaranteed synthesis pass, either set "max_loops": 2 on the swarm (the framework’s director is handed every first-round output on its second pass and can route the synthesis to the Engagement Director by name/description), or collect the four specialist outputs client-side and issue one more /v1/agent/completions call using the Engagement Director’s system prompt.

Step 3: Run the Engagement

The client brief is the only input. Replace it with whatever your client actually asked for.
The Engagement Director’s output is your deck outline — a slide-by-slide structure an associate can drop into PowerPoint or a partner can edit directly. The individual worker outputs become your appendix and your supporting workbooks.

Step 4: Scale to a Portfolio of Clients

Boutiques and corporate strategy teams routinely run the same study shape against a portfolio: every regional bank in a watchlist, every PE portfolio company evaluating an adjacent market, every market a multinational is screening for entry. Use /v1/swarm/batch/completions to run the same engagement template against each brief in one call.
The batch endpoint is Pro/Ultra/Premium-only. See Batch Swarm Completions for the full reference.

Cost vs. a Real Engagement

Real numbers. A first-cut market-entry analysis at a top-tier consultancy typically runs $200k–$500k: two associates and an engagement manager for four to six weeks, plus partial partner time at roughly $800/hour. A four-analyst week alone is on the order of $250k in billables. The swarm above runs the same first-cut analysis end-to-end for under $5 per deck, finishes in minutes instead of weeks, and produces a slide-by-slide outline a partner can edit directly. The partner is still the partner — the swarm just removes the four weeks of associate-level synthesis that used to sit between the question and the recommendation.

Next Steps